A Fugitive in Walden Woods

by Norman Lock

  I came up from the black waters of sleep, like one who is drowning, to find beefy hands around my throat. Lungs near to bursting, I struggled to draw breath, fearing that my windpipe would be crushed. Abruptly, a man removed his hands from my neck. The air rasped as I took it in with the avidity of a man at his last gasp.

  “Benches are for sitting!” he snarled. I could smell liquor and onions on his breath. “Only a dumb nigger would sleep on a bench.”

  His face swung in and out of darkness—or rather, the light on his face did as the oil lamp suspended overhead swung back and forth like the tongue of a bell. I thought of a bell because one was ringing the hour up on deck. I hadn’t the presence of mind to count the strokes.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said with a resentment I would not have felt when a slave, any more than a pig could resent its sty or a monkey its cage. Bondman, pig, and monkey can fear, hate, and suffer their squalid confinement, but resentment requires a luxury of time and subtlety of thought denied to animals and brutalized human beings. I hated this white man, a choleric drunkard who was no better than a slave breaker or a man hunter. I felt my neck tenderly, as if to assure myself that there was no rope around it.

  “I gag on the smell of you coloreds! If you know what’s good, you’ll get up on deck and air yourself out.”

  I ought to have risen up in fury. The moment demanded it; my story, which was unspooling the thread God had given me, demanded it. It was the point to which all my life seemed to have been tending. But to what purpose my righteous indignation? The man could easily have finished me and left me for dead amid crates of geese, their gristly necks destined for the meeting of the ax and the block. I had traveled too far to be murdered by an enraged bigot on the packet to Boston. I am no Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman, however much I might wish to be.

  And so I thanked him for his clemency, went up, and sat under the stars, which are said to be baleful on occasion. But the stars never did me harm, but were, in the bleak nights of captivity, a delight. I had often wished myself on one of them, for they are nearer to heaven than this earth, whose miseries God does not see and whose cries He no longer hears. I once believed that He hated His black creatures like a thing that’s spoiled. I pictured Him as a crotchety old massa wearing a white suit and a Panama hat, who liked to sit on His porch of an evening and watch the sun setting on His property, drinking mint julips, and listening to the sad songs of His darkies.

  When Israel was in Egypt’s land:

  Let my people go,

  Oppress’d so hard they could not stand,

  Let my People go.

  Go down, Moses,

  Way down in Egypt’s land,

  Tell old Pharaoh,

  Let my people go.

  I would have cursed God if I had not feared His scourge. I tasted cinders in my mouth. I tasted the salt of blood and the bitter herbs of humiliation.

  With no one to pray to, I lay in the stern with my head on my arm, gnawing the rag-and-bone of my heart, until the threshing of the stern paddle put me to sleep. In the morning, I awoke, to find some canvas sacking thrown over me. I never knew who had done me this kindness. At the wharf, as I walked down the gangway, above nests of reeds and trash floating on the dark, oily water, the man who had choked me hissed, “Go back where you came from, nigger!” But by the action of some gracious, little-understood power, I was able to set the memory of a countervailing goodness against his enmity.

  Stepping onto the pier, my legs buckled and I was sick—not in fear, but in reaction to the abruptly unmoving earth. A gull laughed in derision. I walked from Long Wharf the half mile to the Christian Freeman office, just along the street from here.

  I was met by a farmer whose wife belonged to the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. He had been to Quincy Market, and the back of his wagon was littered with white beans, squash, and turnip greens. I relished the lingering odor of soil like a pleasure fondly remembered. I got up onto the seat next to him, and we traveled the twenty miles to Concord, where I first met Mr. Emerson. My clothes reeked of the Grace’s coal smoke, a reminder that the stink of the inferno is strong enough to pollute even Paradise.

  The farmer was silent during our drive and made no attempt to be untrue to his dour nature. I took his taciturnity as you would a courtesy: I preferred to be treated neither worse nor better than any other man. I would have been embarrassed by the strain of conversation, which did not come naturally to him. He did offer me chewing tobacco, which I could decline without fear of giving him offense.

  And that, I thought, was proof of my emancipation. I might not have been a free man entirely in law—in slave states, I was neither free nor even a man—but on the seat of the lumbering wagon, I felt myself disenthralled by the ordinary business of men, freely transacted.

  By sunset, I was standing in Concord’s Monument Square, with the few articles of clothing I possessed in a satchel given me by the Quaker lady in Brooklyn. I felt like Lear without a kingdom, hearth, or even a heath to call his own. Like him, I would be obliged to live on the sufferance of others. As I write that line, I realize how ridiculous a simile it is, how self-aggrandizing. But let it stand. This slave’s narrative is a record of his thoughts and feelings. No matter how wrongheaded or foolish they might appear, they are mine.

  Mr. Bronson Alcott, an abolitionist and a station master of the Underground Railroad, arrived on foot, and together we walked to Emerson’s house, called “Bush,” on the Cambridge Turnpike.

  My throat was parched, and I asked for water, which the young amanuensis brought me.

  “How did you make your way during the first days of your exile?” asked Garrison, who appeared to have been spellbound by my recitation, unless I had been deceived by an effect of light playing on his spectacles’ lenses that caused his eyes to shine.

  “It was not exile,” I said, undismayed by having contradicted him.

  “No,” he replied. “Jeroboam’s plantation was no Eden from which to be cast out.”

  “Mr. Emerson had secured for me a place to live and also the means by which I could subsist. I worked for him and his Concord Transcendentalist friends, preparing and tending their vegetable gardens and orchards, doing what handiwork I could on their houses and outbuildings. I also worked every morning at the Mill-dam sawmill, sharpening blades and sweeping up the shavings. In my single-handed fashion, I made my way until I went to Walden Woods in order to be useful to Henry. I continue odd-jobbing, but I give him as much of my attention as he can tolerate.”

  “The motions of destiny are indeed bewildering,” said Garrison.

  The man whose arms were encased in sleeve-protectors made a guttural noise of assent.

  Having concluded my autobiography, I shut my eyes as though to rid them of the vivid, often painful scenes that had passed before them. I had not told Garrison everything concerning my life as slave and fugitive. Whose memories are so comprehensive, whose powers of self-discovery so strong and honest that they can tell all? From my days and nights, I had selected some, which might or might not have been the most significant, according to the machinery of recollection, which I do not understand. Garrison, however, was delighted by my narrative and paid me the compliment of saying that mine was “as fine an accounting as that by Frederick Douglass.” I was pleased that he had not shown astonishment at my fluency—that I was not, in his estimation, a “well-spoken negro.”

  “Mr. Douglass happens to be in Boston,” said Garrison. “I am sure you two would have much to say to each other.”

  I lacked the audacity to meet a celebrated figure like Frederick Douglass. I had “crept up gradually” on Henry and on Emerson, as Sam Staples, the sheriff, had once said of me. I had grown accustomed to them as people and never gave much thought to their fame. But I could no more imagine meeting Mr. Douglass than I could the prophet Moses. Garrison, who was alert to others’ feelings, must have sensed my confusion, because he said, “Another time, perhaps.”

  “Yes,” I sai
d. “Another time. I must be getting back to Concord. Mr. Hawthorne and I are going back together.”

  Four years ago, I did meet Mr. Douglass, in Washington City. We spent an agreeable hour in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, talking about the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Utah War; the panic on Wall Street; Samuel Cartwright’s book Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, proving that slaves who run away from their masters are stricken with a form of insanity called Drapetomania; President Buchanan’s dictum “I acknowledge no master but the law”; and the Dred Scott decision, by which the Supreme Court confirmed the negroes’ legal status as property. Neither of us was inclined to reminisce about his past life. It was better that way. Besides, what could one of us have said to the other to change or enlighten him? We were two fingers of the same hand; what one knew, the other did also by virtue of common blood and experience.

  He did say this, as I recall: “Abolition will not put an end to slavery.”

  I thought at the time that he was wrong.

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK, I WAS INSIDE the Lamb Tavern, waiting for Hawthorne to arrive. The elation I had felt when I left Garrison’s office had faded into gloom. I had been in an expansive mood, but while I walked through the Boston streets to the tavern, I realized that the strength that had made me take heart was illusory. Neither unassailable freedom nor unfettered manhood was within my gift. I was beholden to Garrison, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne—my life depended on their goodwill and the tolerance of others. I had no place that could not be taken from me, no possessions that could not be distrained. I could hold my head up just so high before risking the ax or the noose. A man hunter could break down the door to my cabin and, with no more than a warrant, drag me back to Virginia in chains.

  Hawthorne arrived and sat at the table. His disheveled hair and clothing told of a man who had been anxious not to keep another man waiting, and for this civility, I was grateful.

  “You’ve been in a great hurry, Nathaniel,” I said, smiling.

  “I have indeed,” he said, mopping his overheated face with his handkerchief. “Pardon my lack of promptness.”

  “I’ve only just arrived myself,” I said, determined not to brood.

  We ordered ale. Hawthorne drank his in a single draft.

  “What a thirst I had!”

  “Did your business go well?” I asked, fascinated by a wisp of foam seeping into his dark mustache. I’m reminded of furbelows, I said to myself, recalling the drummer who had stood at the steamer rail, like an explorer taking possession of an undiscovered land in the name of an imperial majesty. Odd, how thoughts jump around in the mind like light reflected in a room from a moving cheval glass.

  “Tolerably. And yours?”

  “I believe so,” I said noncommittally.

  I was too exhausted to go into the matter. We were soon served our supper—game hens for Hawthorne, mackerel for me. Although I do not care for oily fish, I did not want to ape his choice. It was an insignificant gesture of independence, but I had no opportunity to make a larger one. Besides, I had not traveled to Boston for the purpose of dinner.

  “I lost all track of time,” he said, carving a pair of small birds on his plate. “At Alcott’s suggestion, I visited the Chinese Museum, in the Marlboro Chapel on Washington Street. I saw many wonderful things—works of Oriental art, musical instruments, clothing, even a food called ‘vermicelli.’ But I was most intrigued by some remarkable toys made in Nanking. When wound with a key, they moved on their own. There was even a locomotive. What would little Eddy have said to that? They were not for sale—not that I have money for toys. As I walked here, I kept thinking about the Hebrew story of the golem. Do you know it, Samuel?”

  “A creature made of mud that was brought to life by the breath of God. Like Adam.”

  “Stranger than he, I think. It is said that a rabbi succeeded in creating a golem, which saved the city of Prague from destruction. The creature had no will of its own and was compelled to do as the rabbi ordered.”

  I recalled how a Haitian slave woman would make moppets of straw and rough effigies of clay. She prayed to Ogún that the master or mistress, driver or breaker would be laid waste. None was that I knew of.

  “I would like to write such a tale,” he said, picking at the delicate bones. “How a man or woman can be helpless against something adventitious—or, better yet, how we can be at the mercy of impulses originating too deep within ourselves for recognition. Perhaps we are wound up by a key. . . .”

  I had had too much experience of that key to comment. For me, it was real and not an idle fancy on which to build a tale. I could almost feel it in my back; the scars it had left were still there. I leaned against the hard chair and winced in order to remind myself of their reality. I was often impatient with authors, for whom life was a tangle of thoughts to untangle. Garrison knows how a rope feels around the neck and that a man is seldom delivered from the mortal complication of a lynch mob’s noose.

  Hawthorne had gone on to talk about Emerson.

  “I spoke harshly of our friend and your ‘benefactor’ this morning, although you might not care for the word. It is patronizing. But there is nothing patronizing about Mr. Emerson. No, I wronged him when I said he was indifferent to the exigencies of ordinary life and people. His purposes are loftier than mine. I mean only to be successful and get Sophia and me out of debt. Ours is a genteel poverty, I hasten to add. I would appear ridiculous in the eyes of someone who has known privation such as yours, Samuel, to talk of hardship.”

  I made a noise at the back of my throat, signifying tolerance.

  “To be truthful, which I try to be, I’m uncomfortable sitting here with you—not for the reason you may suppose: I have no prejudice. I consider you an intelligent and amiable fellow, companionable in my own habitual silences. But you are a constant reminder—a rebuke—to my race, Samuel, and I cannot help feeling guilty in your presence.”

  I knew all there was to know about guilt.

  “It’s damn awkward! I don’t know whether to ignore the fact that you are a black man or insist on it. Whatever I do is likely to cause offense, which I do not intend or want. How are the two races to come together at last if we find it difficult to spend an hour over dinner?”

  “I don’t find it so,” I said, lying.

  “Then you are a better man than I am. Let me change the subject.”

  He changed it to Henry.

  “He is the most unmalleable fellow alive—the most tedious, irksome, and intolerable—the narrowest and most notional—and yet, true as all this is, he has qualities of intellect and character I cannot help but envy.”

  He went on to assay Henry’s character: his industry and indolence . . . sociability and misanthropy . . . courtesy and incivility . . . openhandedness and meanness . . . originality and—

  With a distracted air, he finished his meal, wiped his greasy lips, and continued his analysis as if he had been a phrenologist and had Henry’s skull before him to read with his fingertips.

  “He is a magpie of other people’s ideas, Waldo’s in particular. He relies too much on figurative language at the expense of an accurate notation of the natural world, whose essentials he claims to understand. He’s an idler and a shirker. For all that, Samuel, I respect him. His friendship means a good deal to me.”

  After a while, I didn’t know if Hawthorne was talking about two different men or about one man—Henry—who, like one of Walden Pond’s eels, was too slippery to grasp. I kept my eyes fixed on Hawthorne’s but let my mind wander, while he expatiated at a length that would have astonished anyone who knew him. I heard someone make a joke, someone laugh, someone begin a song and end it abruptly, someone curse under his breath, a chair scraped back in anger, someone cough, and the flu rattle in the chimney to let out the smoke that had suddenly bloomed inside the sooty tavern walls.

  “I’ve never asked what you think of Henry,” said Hawthorne, having reached the end of his appraisal. “Or perhaps you think it indiscr
eet to talk about him. . . .”

  “Not at all,” I said, trying to sound like a man of the world. “I also admire him.”

  I did admire Henry, although I heard a faint antiphon of mistrust inside my head. My appreciation of his qualities would increase when he began to walk the woods with a notched stick and paddle the ponds with a plumb line to sound their depths. With those rude instruments, he took the rough measure of the world beyond his fancy. He became less like Emerson and more like Hawthorne, less an idealist and more a pragmatist. Since then, however, I have come to believe that the largest truths often lie in the figures we make of them.

  “The world admires Henry, except for a peevish few in Concord and its environs who call him harebrained, a crackpot, and a ‘woods burner,’” said Hawthorne.

  He was alluding to an accident two years before, when Henry fell asleep by Fairhaven Bay and, having left his fire unattended, it burned down three hundred acres of woodland. Had the wind been in the right quarter, the fire would have scorched the town. Some never forgave him for the destruction of their woodlots, and Henry never did make good their losses.

  “Should a man’s foibles be taxed when preparing a final statement of his worth?” asked Hawthorne. “Or should they be brushed aside like the shavings of a pencil sharpened without a thought to tidiness and used to set down on paper a truth of the mind or eye?”

  Having no answer to make, I said, “He spends much of his time at his writing desk.”

  “Sentences don’t make themselves as oysters do pearls,” said Hawthorne. “And will you write your story?”

  I guessed then that Emerson had spoken of my odious conduct at Freemasons’ Hall, and I damned him silently for not having kept it from Hawthorne. I was embarrassed and weary of a conversation that had prolonged itself beyond supper and on to whiskey and cigars, purchased by me for both of us with the money remaining from Emerson’s largesse in order to spite him.